Trigger Joy, Trigger Healing, Trigger love

This photo popped up in my memories today and immediately took me back to Bali, flying through the air on a swing with that glorious mixture of freedom, beauty, ridiculousness and play that makes you feel very alive.

I can look at the photo now, years later, and something of the experience returns. Not in exactly the same way, of course. I am sitting here looking at a photograph rather than swinging through the Bali air, but my body responds to the image. I remember the feeling. My face changes. There is warmth, gratitude, generosity, connection, and that delicious quality of playfulness that can disappear remarkably quickly when we get busy being serious grown-ups.

I love that.

An experience happened once, yet something of its imprint remains available to me. We tend to understand this very easily when the memory is uncomfortable. Something reminds us of an earlier experience and suddenly the past has found its way into the present. A smell, a place, someone's tone of voice, a particular expression on a face, and the human instrument responds. Memory isn't always experienced as a tidy story filed away in the mind; it can arrive through sensation, emotion, imagery, association, physiology and the almost instantaneous meaning we make of what is happening now.

We speak a great deal about these difficult imprints, and rightly so. Understanding the way our histories participate in our present experience is an important part of human development. Yet I have become equally interested in another question: if our organism can become familiar with pathways of fear, protection and dis-ease, what happens when we deliberately give attention to experiences of joy, love, beauty, connection and freedom?

This isn't about pretending everything is wonderful. I have no interest in using joy as a brightly coloured curtain we pull across grief, anger, fear or whatever else is genuinely asking to be experienced. All of it belongs to this extraordinary spectrum of being human. What interests me is our participation in where attention goes.

I have noticed in my own life that the more I invite my mind to remember joyful experiences, the more readily they seem to appear. It is almost as though I am reminding the instrument, these are part of your history too. There is neurobiological shift. That matters to me.

Our histories aren't made only from the experiences that hurt us. They also contain the afternoon we laughed until we couldn't breathe, the person whose presence made our whole body soften, the ridiculous adventure, the music that cracked something open, the first swim of summer, the smell of somebody we loved, the dog that greeted us as though we'd returned from a decade-long expedition when we'd only been out for twenty minutes.

There are thousands of these moments woven through a life and many of them disappear from immediate attention simply because we're no longer looking in their direction. A photograph can bring one back.

So can music. Smell is magnificent at it. Movement can do it. A conversation. A piece of clothing. Returning to a place. Closing our eyes and deliberately allowing ourselves to remember not merely what happened, but what the experience felt like from within.

There is something quite different about remembering Bali as a fact, I went on a swing, and allowing myself to receive the sensory image again: the height, the air, the movement, the landscape, the laughter, the freedom of surrendering to the swing and letting myself be carried through space. Now the memory has some juice in it, this is where a simple photograph becomes a practice in attention.

I can stay with the feeling for a little longer instead of glancing at it and moving on. I can let myself enjoy it without needing to turn it into anything productive. I can notice what joy feels like in my particular instrument. I can marinate in it. Where does it live? Does the chest open? Does breath move differently? Does my face soften? Do I want to move, laugh, reach towards somebody, create something, go outside?

The interesting thing is that joy rarely seems to remain an isolated little emotion. When I give it room, other qualities often come along for the ride. Generosity appears. Beauty becomes easier to notice. I feel more affectionate towards people. Creativity has a little more room. Play becomes possible. Gratitude isn't something I need to manufacture because it has arisen naturally from the experience itself.

This is what I mean by marinating.

Rather than grabbing a pleasant memory and quickly demanding that it improve me, I can spend some time in relationship with the qualities it awakens. Let the instrument receive them again. Let attention linger. There is good reason to be interested in this from what we understand about memory, attention and the brain's capacity to change through experience, but I don't want to reduce the whole thing to biochemistry. Biochemistry participates, absolutely. So do the nervous system, emotion, perception, imagination, sensory experience and the meaning we give things. Through the wider lens of my work I am also interested in the energetic tone of an experience—the very different quality we can feel in ourselves when we are contracted, connected, joyful, frightened, playful, loving or free.

We know these differences from the inside. We also know them in one another.

Walk into a room where someone is genuinely delighted to see you and something is communicated before either of you has delivered a lecture on your respective internal states. Joy has expression. Love has expression. Playfulness has expression. They move through faces, voices, bodies, gestures, attention and what becomes possible between people.

So this little practice isn't only about feeling good. It is an exploration of what we are nourishing within the instrument and, consequently, what becomes more available for expression through it.

I think this is an important distinction because conscious creation can easily be misunderstood as trying to control reality with our thoughts. That isn't what I mean. Life will continue to bring the full spectrum. Things will happen that we would never consciously order from the menu, and when grief comes I want the capacity to grieve; when anger has intelligence I want to hear it; when fear communicates something important I don't want to paste a smiling Bali photograph over its mouth.

I also don't want to unconsciously rehearse dis-ease simply because the mind has become extraordinarily good at finding it.

There is room to become intimate with the difficult and to deliberately nourish what is beautiful. For me, that is part of self-governance: developing enough relationship with attention to recognise that I can participate in what I repeatedly give life to.

Today a photograph did it for me. Bali. A swing. A moment of surrender and ridiculous joy that my human instrument apparently still remembers rather well. So I am letting myself enjoy the memory. I am giving it a little airtime, allowing the feeling to move through me again and noticing what comes with it. Love. Beauty. Connection. Generosity. Freedom. Play.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. What a lovely thing to discover tucked away in the archives of myself and what a lovely reminder that when we go looking through our history, there is so much more there than what hurt.

There is also what made us come alive.

• Ways in which we can cultivate and infuse the feedback of joy to be a pattern rich in the embodiment is.

  • Bring out your album of great vibes and trigger the feels.

  • Enliven the practice of appreciation. Look at what you do, have or have had and feel the feels. Who was involved and how did they support you in your now. Good, bad and ugly. Dive into the appreciation station.

  • Bring on your child like spirit. Remember what it feels like to truly play, just for playing sake.

  • Have fun, smile and laugh at many things.

Here’s to triggering more joy and living life in this moment. 🌟💖

#JoyfulMemories #HealingThroughJoy #BaliSwing #LivingLifeFully